Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat

This article discusses how members of marginalized groups in the Indian state of Gujarat make sense of hegemonic discourses about national development in light of their own experiences and material circumstances. For many, the idea of development resonates even when they do not experience material progress in their lives. This partial hegemony of development discourse can be explained by the concept of “political articulation.”. This captures the political process by which parties succeed, at specific historical moments and under certain circumstances, in joining different, even potentially conflictual interests by referring to a common idea and project. The article focuses on Ahmedabad city where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a cross-caste bloc through the trope of development. The BJP has been particularly effective in linking the idea of development to mundane concerns about security, identity and spatial order. However, anxieties about the degradation of labour by increased casualization, informalization, and socio-spatial marginalization have disrupted this common sense linkage and weakened the hegemony of the BJP's model of development.     

‘Hold that Pose!’ Photography and kabuki in Kitano Takeshi's Kikujiro

This article examines Kitano Takeshi's film Kikujiro (Kikujirō no Natsu, 1999) from two directions: first, as an as an experiment in moving versus still photography, and second, as an exploration of time, memory and Japanese identity. I argue that it is in Kitano's cinematic use of elements from the kabuki drama that the two aspects come together. Kitano plays upon the conventions of both kabuki and film media to highlight the significance of the ‘still shot’ as it functions in human memory. By presenting moments of the story in the format of a child's photograph album, Kitano is able to explore ideas of ‘adult’ and ‘child’ as equally arbitrary constructions. Throughout Kikujiro, Kitano draws on a rich tradition of film, drama and television convention in order to explore the idea of where identity comes from – does it come from the past, the present, or do we make it up ourselves? Kitano places emphasis on the still mie pose to heighten emotion and draw attention to the present moment. By contrasting this method against that of photography, Kitano juxtaposes past and present modes of expression, enabling him to interrogate notions of time and the supposed timelessness of art. Finally, Kitano's critical use of the past locates identity not in some distant, unobtainable myth of the nation, but in the lived experience of each individual as a human being.     

The Politics of England

Party political interest in the so‐called ‘English Question’ has grown in recent years, due to the enmeshing of constitutional issues with a growing political and public affiliation with and expression of English national identity and culture. More recently, attention has shifted to the decentralisation of government within England. The ‘English Question’ is thus defined by two interconnected but distinctive ‘English Questions’. This article will assess whether, in seeking to find answers for these ‘English Questions’, the Conservatives and Labour are establishing a more distinctive ‘politics of England’. It will first consider the extent to which the politicisation of English identity and civic society have stimulated a more nationally framed political culture and party politics, and then assess whether constitutional reforms undertaken in Westminster, especially the introduction of EVEL, and regional devolution initiatives within England might facilitate greater party political engagement with an emergent ‘politics of England’.     

Deconstructing Diplomacy: Derridean Political Theory and U.N. Deal-Making

This paper engages in a reading of several Derrideantexts, particularly Spectres of Marx, Politics of Friendship, and The Post Card, inan attempt to divine a coherent Derridean social andpolitical philosophy. It is submitted that such acoherent theory of civil society can be made out, onewhich situates civil relations in national borders andshared history. Such a situation, however, isproblematic for international relations theory andinternational law, which depend a priori onlocating the foundations of civil society in somethingwhich transcends nationalism and shared experience. By engaging in a reading of the Declaration ofFriendly Relations Between States, this paperdemonstrates the apparent incompatibility of Derrideanpolitical philosophy and international law. In theprocess, it explores Derrida's strategy fortransforming the nature of international relations andlaw and, in so doing, identifies the relationshipbetween Derridean theory and the international legaltheory of Arangio-Ruiz.     

论民族主义及其中国当代形态

民族主义是建立在民族情感上的思想观念,是民族共同体成员对本民族的热爱和对民族生存与发展的追求与理想。当代中国民族主义是以对中华民族和中华人民共和国认同与忠诚为基础,围绕实现中国现代化而展开的思想情结与政治思潮。民族主义在当代中国呈现出积极健康的主流,但也滋生了消极片面的非主流和日益极端的反主流。     

浅析网络民族主义与中国国家安全

网络民族主义是指主要以互联网作为言论平台,自发表达爱国热情的一种社会现象。它具有明显的突发性、一定的自发性以及一定的非理性与理性思考相结合的特点。网络民族主义主要以民族团结和舆论导向问题为切合点,对国家安全既有积极作用,也有消极作用。中国政府应采取相应措施,包括加强网络舆论监督,培养理性的传播者、接受者队伍,建立完善的网络法律体系,采取灵活政策正确组织引导等,使当代中国网络民族主义成为维护国家安全与社会政治稳定、促进民族团结的积极因素。     

Market-driven dairying and the politics of value,labor and affect in Gujarat,India

Ethnography in Gujarat, India’s poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This contribution reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value, and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human–animal relations challenge both capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.     

An undisclosed story of roses: church,state, and nation in contemporary Georgia

Since the Rose Revolution (2003), Georgia has encountered an unprecedented scale of institutional reforms concomitant with the rise of American and European involvement in the “democratization” process. Various scholars have suggested that Georgian nationalism developed from an ethno-cultural basis to a more civic/liberal orientation after the Rose Revolution. This paper analyzes Georgian nationalism under President Mikheil Saakashvili to demonstrate the significant divergence between political rhetoric on national identity, the selection of symbols, and state policy toward the Georgian Orthodox Church versus state policy toward ethnic minorities. The aim of this article is to examine the at times conflicting conceptions of national identity as reflected in the public policies of Saakashvili’s government since the Rose Revolution. It attempts to problematize the typologies of nationalism when applied to the Georgian context and suggests conceptualizing the state-driven nationalism of the post-Rose Revolution government as “hybrid nationalism” as opposed to civic or ethno-cultural.     

Building Support for the Asad Regime: The Syrian Diaspora in Argentina and Brazil and the Syrian Uprising

ABSTRACT

Brazil and Argentina are hosts to two of the largest populations of Syrian descent in Latin America. While Syrian immigrants and their descendants have usually defined their identities based on broad Arab nationalistic references, creating and affiliating themselves to Syrian-Lebanese and/or Arab institutions, the ongoing civil war in Syria has triggered an unprecedented mobilization around specifically Syrian issues. Most diasporic organizations have shown an unconditional support for the Ba?thist regime. This article aims at understanding the political mobilization of the Syrian diaspora in Argentina and Brazil, as well as unveiling how Bashar al-Asad's government has tried to build on their support.     

Nationalism in the USSR: a historical and comparative perspective

The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise of political nationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development of cultural nationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of Communist nationalities policy. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the USSR (49 regions, 1917–1991), using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions to the field. First, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a “quantification of history” approach. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods such as SEM. Second, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy.